Chromium OS for MacBook Air Released, Here is How to Install on Your Macbook Air

Hexxeh, a UK based developer and student has long standing contribution to Chromium OS, an open source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web. Starting from Chromium OS vanilla build to flow, a hugely popular version of Chromium OS and hacking CR-48 BIOS (Google’s pilot program) to Chromium OS Lime version, Hexxeh has done remarkable work on Chromium OS.

Recently he had announced to get Chromium OS for MacBook Air if he gets enough support from fans to buy MacBook Air and guess what he did succeed and fulfilled his promised though bit late. So finally Chromium OS for MacBook Air is here with every bit of hardware working except Bluetooth. Boot time may not be as fast as OS X but it is still around 22 seconds to the login screen, the delay is because of Apple’s EFI implementation & battery life is probably slightly better than that of OS X.

Hexxen has tested this on an 11″ model of the Air (MacbookAir3,1) and must not be of any issue with 13″ version (MacbookAir3,2) or generations of the Macbook Air.

There is however, one huge caveat, since nVidia’s GPU drivers don’t work very well under an EFI boot, you have to use BIOS emulation mode, probably more commonly known as Boot Camp. However, Apple’s BIOS emulation implementation doesn’t support booting from a USB stick. So, to boot Chromium OS you must first copy it to the SSD, overwriting OS X, meaning formatting your SSD completely and losing all your data. Which we feel will be major setback for early adopters.

Sandip Dedhia

Sandip Dedhia is the founder of Blogsdna.com, he loves to write on technology, gadgets & web services. At Blogsdna you can read his Windows tutorials, free and useful software related articles. He is on twitter too @sandipndView author profile